October 8, 1995. "Who is abusing the children of Wenatchee?" by Armin Brott (Knight-Ridder
News Service Columnist) in The Sacramento Bee, Forum, tells a
pathetic story, too often repeated in recent years. The United States Supreme
Court has recently (Nov. 1994) refused to hear
an appeal of Bill and Kathy Swan who
have spent 50 months in prison and had their daughter taken away from them based on the
hearsay testimony of day-care workers. The children did not testify and there was no
physical evidence of abuse. The court did not comment on their refusal to hear the appeal
but in 1990 they ruled that defendants can be convicted of child abuse without confronting
their accusers when there is assurance of the reliability of the hearsay testimony. Such a
broad ruling opens the door to abuse by overzealous prosecutors and other alleged
defenders of children. Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard, an expert on the law of
evidence who submitted a brief supporting the appeal, called the Court's refusal to hear
the appeal "the most extreme example of erosion [of the constitutional guarantee that
criminal defendants have a right to confront witnesses against them] of which I am aware.
It seems that the Court is saying that people can be convicted of child abuse without
making a reasonable effort to discover whether the abuse even happened. Hearsay
evidence from a "reliable source" is all that is needed. The emotional nature of
this issue probably guarantees that clear thinking and fairness will be subordinated to
the desire to defend innocent children.

The Supreme Court ruling also opens the door for overzealous prosecutors and law
enforcement who are prone to the same kinds of misguided abuses as the trauma-search
therapists. These trauma- search cops have destroyed more than one community, including
pastoral Wenatchee in rural Washington state. There, a local group has formed to fight
back against trauma-search cops and therapists. The group calls itself
Concerned Citizens for Legal Accountability, but
it is much more than that. It is a kind of WWW clearinghouse for stories of legal
and psychological abuse by police, child protective services and therapists. The people of
Wenatchee realize that what happened to their community could happen anywhere in America.
All it takes is one zealous cop--in this case Detective Bob Perez--to get things started
and he can turn a troubled youth's lies and fantasies into a sex ring involving 30 to 50
children led in orgies in church by a local Pentecostal pastor and his wife. It is good
news that Pastor Robert Roberson and his wife, Connie, were found innocent of all charges
in December 1995. The bad news is that their lives and the lives of many children have
been damaged by a crusading cop and his accomplices in Child Protective Services and the
District Attorney's office. Perez and Gary Riesen, prosecuting attorney, have charged more
than 80 adults with having weekly orgies with children. More than 25 have pleaded guilty
to various offenses, though some, like the Rev. Roberson and his wife, have fought the
charges, risking imprisonment and loss of their children. Eleven people have been
convicted after trials; fifteen plea bargained, though most of them have since recanted.
Many of those charged are illiterate and on welfare. Five are developmentally disabled,
two have severe emotional problems, two have physical disabilities and two others are
mentally ill. "These conditions don't exclude the possibility that all are guilty of
child abuse, but they certainly underscore the fact that Perez and his cohorts have been
prosecuting some vulnerable people." [Brott, Bee]

Unlike the Swans, who lost their daughter and have been imprisoned for more than four
years, the Wenatchee witchhunt did not begin with charges from a mentally ill day care
worker. In Wenatchee they began with charges from a 15-year old girl with an IQ of 60 who
tried to kill her foster father because he wouldn't let her have sex with her boyfriend in
the house. By the time Perez finished interrogating the troubled teen, she had accused her
foster father of years of sexual abuse. She later recanted her charges. Then Perez went
after her 10-year old foster sister and by the time he was finished interrogating her she
had identified 22 places where she said she'd been molested, including Pastor Roberson's
church. Roberson made the mistake of speaking publicly about Perez and his methods of
interrogation. Five days after his public denunciation of the detective's tactics,
Roberson and his wife were in jail on charges of running weekly orgies in their church.

One would think that with all those convictions, there must be some truth to Perez's
accusations. However, besides his word for it and the testimony of children who been
interrogated by Perez, the evidence for a child abuse ring is non-existent. Perez keeps no
notes and has no audio or video tapes of any of his interrogations. Perhaps he learned
from the McMartin trials that such tapes can be damaging as they are likely to show
zealous cops and therapists leading on and coercing children into tales of abuse. Plus,
there is the testimony of the children who have refused to go along with him. One says he
threatened to arrest her mother if the child didn't admit she'd been abused. Another
claims that he made her lie. Another was tracked down in California by Perez himself,
brought back to Washington and placed in a mental facility in Idaho where she was given
"treatment" because she wouldn't testify that her parents had abused her. When
she kept denying that she'd been abused she was told by the "counselors" that
she was in denial and that she'd "come around soon." [Brott, Bee]

Prosecutor Riesen notes: "look at the convictions we've got. If Perez wasn't going
by the book, the courts would have had something to say about it." [Brott, Bee]
The courts may have something to say about it eventually, but I wouldn't count on it being
right. No judge wants to appear to be a friend of child abusers. Few crimes are more
repulsive than child abuse. I'm sure Perez and Riesen come off as saintly guardians of
children battling the evil abusers because they really believe that is what they are. And
they are not alone in their delusion: they are joined by physicians, nurses, day care
workers, social workers, judges and juries. Evidence doesn't matter here. The children are
what matter. And, yes, it is the children who are being abused here, but they are not the
only ones. It should terrify anyone in this society to realize that they could be next in
line to be guilty even if proven innocent and that they and their children might be next
to be abused by a legal system gone crazy.

In California, the first and, as far as I know, only criminal trial based
on recovered memory was that of George Franklin Sr. Dr. Lenore Terr was the prosecution's
expert witness. In 1990, Franklin was found guilty of murdering a child twenty years
earlier. The main witness against him was his 30-year-old daughter, Eileen Lipsker, who
said she repressed the memory of the murder until one day when she had a
"flashback" while looking into her own daughter's eyes. Suddenly, she said, she
remembered her father molesting her 8-year-old girl friend and smashing the child's skull
with a rock. Eileen had told Terr that as a child she had torn out her hair, creating a
bloody bald spot on her head. In her book, Unchained Memories, Terr writes:
"Most likely, young Eileen unconsciously set out to duplicate the horrible wound she
had seen on Susan Nason's head." Eileen's mother Leah Franklin, however, says she
does not remember seeing a bald spot on her daughter's hair during her childhood years
when she combed, braided and cut her child's hair. Leah Franklin also says she gave
prosecutors more than forty photographs of Eileen as a child and that none of them showed
any hair problems.

Eileen Lipsker also said that she now remembers her father threatening to kill her if
she told anyone about his crime. She now also claims to remember that her father sexually
abused her numerous times. She says that she learned to protect herself by
"forgetting" what had happened. Maybe. Or maybe the idea of being abused and
forgetting it were suggested to her by her therapist during a hypnosis session. "In
August 1989, Eileen confided in her brother that she was in therapy and had been
hypnotized. The next day, she told her brother that while she was under hypnosis she had
visualized her father killing Susan Nason. In September 1989, Eileen told her mother about
the memory, confiding that it had come back to her during a hypnotherapy session."
She later recanted the hypnosis story.
[Loftus]

Defense lawyers argued that the daughter could have unconsciously fabricated the whole
story out of anger and fear of her father. They even suggested she may have made up
everything for the $500,000 book and movie deal she's signed. Maybe. In any case,
Franklin's conviction was overturned in 1995 on the grounds that the jury had been
prevented hearing testimony that the source of nearly every detail which Eileen remembered
about the murder could have been newspaper accounts readily accessible to her. Elizabeth
Loftus concluded

I have little doubt that Eileen Franklin believes with every cell of her being that
her father murdered Susan Nason. But I believe there is a very real possibility that the
whole concoction was spun not from solid facts but from the vaporous breezes of wishes,
dreams, fears, desires. Eileen's mind, operating independently of reality, went about its
business of collecting ambiguities and inconsistencies and wrapping them up into a
sensible package, revealing to her in one blinding moment of insight a coherent picture of
the past that was nevertheless completely and utterly false.

In short, it is likely that Eileen's memory is a confabulation based upon newspaper
accounts, possible discussions of those accounts which she overheard or participated in,
and her own fears and desires perhaps given a big boost by therapy which included
hypnosis, and finally reinforced by a distinguished expert.

March 2, 1995.The Associated Press (AP) reports that a California state appellate
court, the 4th District Court of Appeals in Santa Ana, has ruled that consumers may no longer sue for property damages stemming from
invisible power emissions.

March 18, 1993. The Wall Street Journal
("Chiropractors Seeking to Expand Practices Take Aim at Children," by Timothy K.
Smith p. A4) reports on a chiropractor who had treated a five-year-old boy and his
four-year-old sister for mastoiditis. The boy's infection had invaded his skull; the
girl's was so severe that part of her face was paralyzed and pus was pressing against her
brain. The children's parents were using a chiropractor as their primary care doctor. The
doctor of chiropractic correctly diagnosed the ear infections and tried to cure the
children by manipulating the bones of their spines. Because they were not treated with
antibiotics, the girl is now deaf in one ear and the boy is still under observation for
neurological damage. The author reports on the systematic efforts of chiropractors to
recruit children as patients. One company, Peter Pan Potential, holds seminars for
chiropractors to teach them how to get more children as patients. Their advertisements for
chiropractors in trade magazines tell the chiropractors to "Do your part to change
the perception of chiropractic with patients who aren't negative or skeptical--they're
children!"

The American Chiropractic Association (ACA) responded to this article with a full page
ad in The Wall Street Journal (March 22, 1993, p. A11). The ACA ad stated that
"It deeply regrets and condemns the unfortunate, although isolated, conduct reported
by The Wall Street Journal." To its credit, the ACA didn't deny that some
chiropractors are dangerous quacks. The ad further stated that "Chiropractic
manipulation is not a substitute for routine vaccinations, and our Association considers
any contrary suggestion to be unethical, unprofessional and wrong." The ad made no
comment on the practice of treating day old babies for spinal misalignment.

The Smith article notes that chiropractic colleges are accredited and their services
are covered by Medicare, Medicaid and some private insurance plans. This gives
chiropractic an "authoritative resonance" which other non-traditional treatments
do not have. The same article in the Wall Street Journal which describes these
children gives an account of children with cancer who have been treated by chiropractors
who made inappropriate diagnoses which "resulted in delay of correct medical
diagnoses and treatment."

Dr. John Bolton, a San Francisco pediatrician, put it best when he said, "It's
criminal to tell kids not to get immunizations because somehow cracking their backs can
prevent infectious disease. It's not reportable as child abuse, although it's certainly
abusive."

Dr. Jennifer Peet thinks differently. She and her husband founded The Baby Adjusters in
1992, a chiropractic clinic mainly for children. She says her clinic adjusts the spines of
150-200 people a day, most of them children and some of them infants. "We check them
when they're 24 hours old. Very gently, it's almost just a tapping, we push the bone back
into alignment." She claims she's cured infections, asthma and allergies. She's
written a book, has a newsletter, pamphlets and posters, gives lectures and sells audio
taps. Next she hopes to start a magazine. Soon, no doubt she'll be on the talk shows.
She'll be recognized
as an "expert" and quoted by others like her who will also write books and quote
each other and reinforce their non-sense until it all has the ring of verisimilitude
about it.

further reading

"Insuring
Alternatives" The July 3, 1996 transcript of a PBS story on Washington State's
decision to force insurers to cover alternative medical practitioners.